![]() From the basic statement “Love is blind,” a periodic sentences morphs into “Love, as everyone knows except those who happen to be afflicted with it, is blind.” For example, “Bells rang, filling the air with their clangor, startling pigeons into flight from every belfry, bringing people into the streets to hear the news.”įinally, the periodic sentence is a basic statement that has additional details added inside it. The strung-along sentence is a basic statement with details strung along after it. If you remove even one word from it, you damage or destroy the meaning. The basic statement is a sentence reduced to its bare bones. My students and I especially benefited from Chapter 9, “The Sound of Sentences,” because it taught us how to start with what Payne called “the basic statement” and develop into more interesting sentences that she called the “strung-along sentence” and the “periodic sentence.” Of course, these two forms can be combined to make other interesting kinds of sentences. This little gem goes on from its chapter on style to discuss “The Size and Shape of Middle Paragraphs,” “Connections Between Paragraphs,” “The Passive Voice,” “The Sound of Sentences,” “Parallel Structure,” “A Way with Words,” and other practical writing principles. Obviously, I’m still having problems following the first rule, but the second rule is one I have followed pretty conscientiously for decades, and it’s helped tighten and improve my style. But it still has plenty of advice for all kinds of writers. As a book designed for use in English composition courses, it focuses on writing the essay, and as a book published in the mid-1960’s, it promotes some stylistic moves that today might be considered stuffy or old fashioned. Like Strunk and White’s handbook, The Lively Art of Writing is based on some simple rules for writing, but each rule is accompanied by interesting elaboration, spot-on examples, and a series of practice exercises that give aspiring writers opportunities to try out the principles in their own writing. I don’t know if it’s a better book than The Elements of Writing, but I came to know it better, much better, because I used it as a textbook for many writing classes I taught in the 1980s (yes, the 1980s-before Andy was born and around the time when Carol turned 40). It’s clearly a cousin to Strunk and White-its tone and style echo the same practical common sensibility of The Elements of Style, but key principles from Lucile Vaughan Payne’s little masterpiece, The Lively Art of Writing, still come to mind anytime I write a sentence. There’s another book, though, that did more for my own writing. White, as a writer and a teacher, I’ve benefited from its rules and suggestions for writing well. I’ve owned the 1959 edition of Strunk and White for many years now, and, like E. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.” A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. One of the handbook’s notable rules was number 13, “Omit needless words,” and it made such an impression on White that he later wrote, “I have been trying to omit needless words since 1919, and although there are still many words that cry for omission and the huge task will never be accomplished, it is exciting for me to reread the masterly Strunkian elaboration of this noble theme.” Then White quotes William Strunk, Jr.: White so admired the book that he was instrumental in having it updated and republished under the same title, Elements of Style, but with his name as co-author for the updates and additions he added to his mentor’s original work. Strunk had published what he called “The Little Book” with the official title of Elements of Style as a required handbook for many writing courses at Cornell. On more than one occasion, White credited William Strunk, Jr., one of his professors at Cornell, for schooling him in the basics of writing well. As a regular contributor to The New Yorker, he was soon recognized as a master stylist for his wonderful essays. ![]() White was a famous writer long before he published Charlotte’s Web. ![]()
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